South of Midnight has been designed with a single, guiding vision, one where thought and care has been put into every decision. In this game, story suffuses everything – combat, boss design, art, even music. Ask the team about any gameplay element, and they won't just tell you why it's fun, they'll tell you the narrative reasoning behind it. Key to all of this is that Hazel's story is about repairing a world, and the individuals caught up in its newly-darkened corners.

It might sound like a heady message, but the way this ties into the game is fundamental – and it's what makes South of Midnight so unique. With such a clear goal in mind, it means that a game in a very familiar genre can feel wholly unfamiliar.

Take South of Midnight's world, for a start. Compulsion describes the game as "wide-linear," a series of distinct chapters, with a set beginning and end, but with opportunities to explore along the way:

Each new region will come with its own biome, a reflection of the South's wildly varied landscapes. All of those biomes are inspired by real-world locations – Sears won't go into detail about the later game yet. However, the magical realist approach allows Compulsion to play with expectation as you travel through its world.

Locations will feel deeply rooted in what we know of the real world – in fact, to help create this section of the game, the developers took a trip to a real Mississippi ghost town, itself infested with alligators (only one of them braved the trek across amphibian territory to get into an abandoned church and take reference shots). But as we travel, we'll see how these areas have become overtaken by the game's mythical creatures, bringing twisted change with them.

Of course, most folktales need antagonists and in the trailer we meet one of them. Two-Toed Tom is based on real-life campfire tales of ancient, giant, seemingly unkillable alligators, and he will – as Clayton puts it – "haunt" this chapter in Hazel's tale. What we've seen are the very edges of his hunting grounds, but Tom will repeatedly reappear as you explore his region, eventually leading us to a showdown. It allows not just for a "boss fight" that effectively spans a whole section of the game, but also allows the team to turn each creature into a full-blown character, rather than a simple mechanism for conflict.

The idea, like everything else here, doesn't seem to be that Hazel will kill the creatures standing in her way, more that she'll be curing them, removing the hurt that turned them into monsters in the first place. And in perhaps the most starkly unexpected part of the trailer, we even hear the game's music reflecting the story that made Tom what he is.

When a hurricane rips through Prospero, Hazel is pulled into a Southern Gothic world where reality and fantasy are interwoven, and ancient creatures from folklore emerge.

The Story of South of Midnight

In our story trailer, protagonist Hazel and her mother are preparing for the impending hurricane. The storm proves massive, causing catastrophic flooding-and causing their own home to be swept down river with her mother in it. Its aftermath shows the fictional town of Prospero, located in the southern United States, eerily calm while irrevocably changed from the hurricane’s destruction. Here, Hazel undertakes a journey in search of her mother, while finding out more about herself and her family’s lineage in the process.

Hazel begins to see fantastical phenomena all over Prospero, including meeting Catfish, an enormous – and talking – creature in his own right, stuck in a tree following the hurricane’s destruction. Catfish tells Hazel she is a Weaver, someone who possesses magical powers and can see how our threads connect to form the woven tapestry of our fates.

As Hazel, players will learn with her to use her powers, overcoming obstacles such as defeating enemies and removing barriers, from ‘conjuring’ past incarnations of objects to use them to overcome traversal and puzzle challenges, to combat-based spells to take on the biggest foes. As Jasmin Roy, South of Midnight’s Game Director highlighted during Developer_Direct, “Push, Pull, and Weave are some of the spells at your disposal that give you a tactical advantage during a fight. Timing is everything. Pull distant enemies close to start melee combos, push them back to interrupt and stun their attack, then press the advantage with follow-up strikes.” 

Behind each monster is a haunting past

Speaking of these creatures, we show a few different types of enemies and characters Hazel will encounter. You’ll see Haints, which are an enemy class that comes in many forms, with Hazel using her weaving powers and magical tools to unravel the corruption afflicting these creatures and the environment around them, and return the area to reality. There’s also a glimpse of Two-Toed Tom, the blind albino alligator the size of an island, whom we shared in our gameplay reveal trailer in 2024.

A new mythical creature shown for the first time is Huggin’ Molly. Inspired by a Southern legend, Huggin’ Molly is a monstrous woman-spider. Her dress is a quilt patchwork made from children’s clothes and her trademark red yarn that she spins like a web. Folks say Huggin’ Molly still ventures out of her mountain lair to snatch random children that wander off from town. But everyone seems to tell a different version of Molly’s story. We also provided glimpses of other creatures including The Rougarou, a shapeshifting were-owl who lives in a dense, dark forest at the edge of the mountain.

A love letter to the South

Our town, Prospero, and its outskirts are a composite of a number of Southern-inspired locations – from flooded country sides, abysmal swamps and Appalachian mountains. And while the game features all sorts of creatures, pulled directly from Southern Fairytales, at its heart it is a story about family and healing. When South of Midnight releases on April 8, 2025, players will be able to see first-hand our commitment to narrative-rich storytelling, mixed with third-person action, in an experience that will take most players between 10-12 hours to complete.

If you want to immerse yourself into the macabre and fantastical world of South of Midnight early, get the Premium Edition to play up to 5 days early, and get access to digital extras.

If you purchase the Standard Edition or are playing with Xbox Game Pass Ultimate or PC and decide you want the Premium Edition, you can upgrade at any time with the Premium Upgrade Edition to get up to five days early access, and access to these digital extras (English only):

• South of Midnight Artbook: Compulsion Games presents The Art of South of Midnight. Organized by the game’s story chapters, this abundant visual gallery includes never-before-seen character art, environmental art, iconography, artist commentary, and more from Compulsion’s modern Southern Gothic folktale.

• Original Soundtrack: Inspired by the haunting allure of the Southern gothic Deep South, the South of Midnight original soundtrack blends traditional Southern-style music with a dark, otherworldly essence. With visionary composer Olivier Deriviere at its helm, the dynamic soundtrack features performances by Southern artists and incorporates traditional instruments to create a diegetic musical narrative that evolves in response to the player’s actions and environment. From soulful blues to lively honky-tonk, each song invokes the region’s rich cultural history, immersing players in an eerie, otherworldly atmosphere where reality and myth collide.

• The Boo-Hag Digital Comic Book: Compulsion Games has teamed up with award-winning comic book artist and writer Rob Guillory to create The Boo Hag, a digital comic book set in the South of Midnight universe. Presented in full color, The Boo Hag explores protagonist Hazel’s encounter with an infamous mythical creature from Deep South mythos, giving readers the chance to dive even deeper into the game’s fantastical and folkloric world.

• Music Video: Songs & Tales of South of Midnight: Feel the magic of South of Midnight’s lyrically driven narrative music with Songs & Tales From South of Midnight, a visual compilation featuring three selected songs from the South of Midnight OST. This field recording-style music video showcases and celebrates the diverse range of Southern musical genres that define South of Midnight’s soundtrack, all while telling a cohesive story through delightfully haunting visuals.

• Documentary: Weaving Hazel’s Journey, Director’s Cut: Weaving Hazel’s Journey: A South of Midnight Documentary (Director’s Cut) offers fans an extended look at the development of Compulsion Games’ third-person action-adventure South of Midnight. This director’s cut explores in even greater detail the team’s world-building process and inspirations drawn from Deep South folktales, featuring exclusive interviews and commentary from various Compulsion Games developers across multiple disciplines, including gameplay, narrative, art, music, and more.

Minimum PC Specs

To play South of Midnight on PC, you will need the following minimum PC specs:

· CPU: AMD Ryzen 3 1300X / Intel i3-8100
· GPU: AMD RX 580 / Nvidia GTX 1060
· Memory: 12GB RAM
· Storage: SSD required (55GB install size)
· DirectX: 12

Composed by Olivier Deriviere (A Plague Tale: Requiem, Get Even), and with lyrics by Sears and the writing team, each song will be woven throughout the Kingdoms, growing in complexity and systemically responding to your actions, until full-blown lyrics begin telling the stories of the creatures you're trying to evade and, eventually, cure. It's rare to hear voiced songs in games – but it's rarer to hear them originally composed to support the narrative throughout a whole game.

Of course, setting and music are one thing, but combat and exploration are often more coldly mechanical pieces of game design – how do you ensure you're still storytelling when you're hammering buttons to take down a Haint or a boss?

Compulsion have utilised a few tricks here. For a start, it's in how Hazel fights and gets around. Everything she can do is powered by her Weaving, and this links your actions intrinsically with that core goal of fixing what's broken. To that end, it comes with a very neat bit of game design – while we see traversal powers (gliding using a Weaver sailcloth) and combat powers (like Unravelling enemies), Hazel will also gain a set of spells that show off Weaving's utility. During the trailer, we can see three abilities available the top-left of the screen, and they come with some mechanical ingenuity:

The powers we can see are Weave, Push, and Pull: Weave can be used to fix objects in place to help traversal, but will also bind enemies; Push and Pull can be used to move objects in the world to help solve puzzles, but also affect combat dynamics, letting you control enemy placement to an extent. You'll unlock more as you go, all with this multifarious functionality. Turning your spells into something that can be used in any situation is a neat metaphor for how Hazel's powers aren't simply about destruction or survival.

The result is a game where the look is as powerful a part of the storytelling as the characters themselves – and the almost uncanny effect of how South of Midnight moves is a part of this, too. Last year's trailer introduced us to Compulsion's maquette-like designs, and stop-motion inspired animation, but seeing it as a working game is proof that the story trailer wasn't just for show.

While the team has tweaked exactly how pronounced the effect is between cinematics, exploration, and combat, one of South of Midnight's biggest differentiators from other games is in how committed the team has been to that look:

And here's the most important point – Compulsion aren't doing things differently simply to be different. There's a guiding principle behind all this: Hazel's story, the reflection of the Deep South, the real-life research that's gone into it, and the myriad ways that storytelling leaks into every bit of design. This team believes in what they're making, and has put thought into, well, everything.

South of Midnight will be released on Xbox Series X|S and PC on April 8, 2025 – and play with Xbox Game Pass on day one.